Please ask: Why?
This summer my family and I took a much needed vacation to NYC and Upstate New York too. We toured Ground Zero and saw the awful looking hole in the ground.
I am reminded of a recent column in the the Chicago Sun Times by Mark Steyn and he quoted James Lileks of the National review:
“If 9/11 had really changed us, there’d be a 150-story building on the site of the World Trade Center today. It would have a classical memorial in the plaza with allegorical figures representing Sorrow and Resolve, and a fountain watched over by stern stone eagles. Instead there’s a pit, and arguments over the usual muted dolorous abstraction approved by the National Association of Grief Counselors. The Empire State Building took 18 months to build. During the Depression. We could do that again, but we don’t. And we don’t seem interested in asking why.”
I kind of thought that, yeah, what the hell is going on. But that’s our trouble. We have a soceity, or at least the “official society of our betters” unable to act in any concrete way.
The great outpouring of public charity after a terrible natural disaster always impresses me [think Hurricane Katrina or the Tsunami in Indonesia.]
The volunteer, self-directed “crisis responders” who poured into NYC after 911, together will the unity displayed by a country, not to mention impromptu international solidarity, driven by the grass roots sense of “the right thing to do” can move mountains.
But nothing else can.
Interestingly, about the only group that can work quickly and officially to avert disaster, or help recover from it, is the military, and the American military in particular. Yet they, the grunts that is, are seen by those they protect or assist as agents of Imperialism by our elites.
Amazing!